Alright, I'm tired of navigator dieing while I'm composing
these things. From now on its vi/paste, baby.

Hey, another three months since my last entry. Maybe I've
stumbled upon some natural zach-diary-frequency.

The maestro3
driver seems to be working for most people with no hard bug
reports. Hooray.
Getting input working is the next big chore, and then I'd
like to clean it
up and make it use Jeff's sane oss_audio rather than the
disgusting hand
done OSS support code it currently has. People are forcing
me to care about the maestro2 as well.
It needs the
same sort of driver cleanup as the m3.

The snow has finally kicked in, and its lovely. I walk
through a park
to get to the subway that I ride to work, and I got to see
little
squirrel dudes jumping around in the snow. It was cute,
even if squirrels are
scary.

Last weekend I flew to Toronto with Phil, George, Mike, and
Tyla to
go to this year's cocktail party. It was a blast. This
year's was a
masquerade, it was fun to see everyone all dressed up with
outrageous
masks. Most had lots and lots of feathers, but Phil and I
settled on
plain black masks that made us look like train robbers. A
really nice
train mind you, given that we were wearing tuxedos, but
still.

A few weekends ago Digweed
held a show for haloween. (some may remember him from his
cameo in Groove.
Mang came up and we
dragged
Steph along, it was tons of fun. Nothing like dancing for a
few hours
in front of big ass speakers to clear your mind.

Streptococcal Pharyngitis sucks in a major way. I, for one,
didn't quite realize how handy a fully functional throat
is. A week of apple sauce and jello? Cool at first glance,
but really..

The good news is that my ESS guy is being particularly
kick-ass recently. I phoned him a few weeks ago asking
about the status of the release of maestro3 information.
After the phone call I had source in my inbox and the next
day a happy fedex arrived with all sorts of gear, including
4-speaker maestro2 setups. Sound hacking can begin again!
Of course, the aforementioned strep took the wind out of
those sails for a good week. The maestro3 mixer is working
now, and I think I've wrapped my brain around how their DSP
software works.. we'll see. The part has lots of potential,
but again lack of quality documentation can be quite
frustrating. I'd love to lock some ESS dudes in a room with
3com or adaptec doc writers for a few weeks.

Will took a break
from his insane work schedule to mail me the BeBox
bootstapping tools. Hooray! This most notably includes the
befs bootdisk that has a teeny piece of code that netboots a
kernel image. I'm so happy to remove the fd burn from the
compile/test/swear/edit/ cycle. So yet more hacking now
possible. When it rains, it pours.

Work is fun. We finally did enough dancing with lawyers to
decide that its OK for me to write packet forwarding code
for the Freedom protocol that happens to include crypto.
While that was going on I happened to find a copy of The
Puzzle Palace at the local Indigo. Sigh, proud to be an
American :/

Wow, am I a slack-ass or what. Almost a month and a half
since my last entry. At least I lasted longer than rth.
OK, so, I guess if people care about anything here they
might care about the state of my geeking.

I'm still flailing around trying to get maestro hardware so
that I can fix up the known problems in the OSS Maestro
driver. The APM hacks it has are not playing nice with
ACPI, there are playback problems that feel like they're due
to APU accessing races, and supporting FM synth and MIDI
would be nice. Then there is the Big Bad Maestro3, aka
Allegro, that is being shipped in lots of machines now. The
bad news is that we can't get full docs on its DSP core.
The good news is that the sparse docs that exist seem to be
enough to get Sound Blaster emulation working. Yes, we're
taking a PCI DSP and telling it to be probably the crappiest
sound chip known to man. Go Team. All of this is made even
more interesting by the fact that I don't have the hardware
:) I have a fellow playing with the allegro remotely. I
also have various people (including ESS) trying to get me
hardware. It will sort itself out in the end.

I packaged up what little code exists for Matofali and put
it up on http://www.zabbo.net/matofali/.
Maybe some adventerous soul will pick it up and run with it.

I sent a note to the NSPR list saying that I had a neato IO
abstraction model and it felt like it might be fun to
include it in NSPR. I got two responses. One of the form
"duh, we have something like that over here.." and "ACK,
wrong wrong wrong." The former wasn't too surprising, but
the code they have is nowhere near ideal. The latter proved
to be quite interesting indeed. A fellow at Netscape sat me
down and explained to me why the IO engine API I had come up
with was on serious crack. Given our discussions, I'd love
to sit down and write an IO engine. But I need some sort of
real world daemon to use it. FTP is tempting, but...
Anyone have any bright ideas?

The BeBox is still lying idle. I still don't have the
infrastructure to be happy coding on it. Someday, someday.

I've just put Gnebula up on http://www.zabbo.net/gnebula/.
Its incomplete, but there you have it. I always wanted to
make it a real Etherman clone, but I just
don't have the patience for interface design.

Another phhttpd release is pending. Chuck is cleaning up
his patches that make the event loop much more clear and
fix the signal queue failover.

Is that it? I guess so. Real Life is as fun as usual.
I'll tell you about it sometime when we're nowhere near
computers.

I've been having lots of fun entertaining visitors. A few
weekends ago Mang, Willy, and Ben visited. We went to an
Astral Projection
party. It was hilarious. I'd never seen so many glow
sticks. But we had Gummy Bears to tide us over, so we
survived just fine. We got home as the sun was coming up
and hit one of the three 24 hour cafes near my apartment.
*yawn*

Deb is
here in Montreal now. Hooray! It turns out there are
uncooperative buildings that are foiling our plans for
wireless goodness, but maybe we can run some cat5 through
the sewers or something. We're only a few blocks apart.

My insane friend Andrew is visiting this weekend. We worked
together on the Netaid project. It was a riot. We're going
to go to IKEA so that I can buy shelves for my poor
computers that are sitting in a pile right now. That much
closer to a proper working environment at home! DSL is
still waiting for Bell to pull their head out, I'm sure.

Ryan visited a while ago too. We had fun, except that I
drank way too much. I thought I had learned not to
drink
on an empty stomach after the inagural Matt Shawn
Wilson party, but apparently I was mistaken. Ung. I'll
never drink vodka, tequilla, or sake again. Well, for a
good few days, anyway.

On the Geek Front, Chuck's Scalable IO
paper is now available near CITI's
linux-scalability page. At least, I thought it was. I
can't find it now. I know it was there somewhere :)
Anyway, its a good paper.
The world needs more Chucks.

Along those lines, the library I'm writing to abstract IO
state engines is coming along nicely. I'll probably plug
Chuck's /dev/poll hacks into it soon and try and release it
under a sensible license. Teaching matofali to use it will
be so cool.

Out of no where, Wil Sowerbutts recently sent me some mail.
One of
these decades I really do intend to take his initial work
and finish the Bebox linux
port. It just needs some PCI and SMP loving. The Bebox
would make the most hilarious test box. Its SMP with no L2
cache and big endian SMP PPC. It will break drivers left
and right. But doing this requires making my computer room
not suck, which requires the shelves mentioned above. All
in good time.

We went to a rave last weekend. A good time was had by all,
except when we had to stand outside waiting in line to get
in. That was cold. The music wasn't as clear as I would
have hoped, but there were a few moments of clarity. Glow
sticks. Have I mentioned glow sticks?

I have a futon-couch now. It is pretending to be The Couch
until I can afford a real one.

We had an exciting time driving to the US border and back to
do some immigration paperwork. On the way back Footloose
came on the radio. Stefan
"smart-ass" Brands pointed out that I was about 7 when
the movie first came out. For the rest of the song he kept
saying things like "I can see you dancing around in front of
the mirror in your little room. Is this the part where you
jumped off the bed? Admit it!". I can look back at the
situation and laugh now. Did I mention we drove to the
border in the Zero Knowledge Van? We turned a few heads, I
think.

Many projects still pending DSL and a proper machine room
build-up at home. Until then I'm playing lots of games
under Windows. Whee!

I just composed a nice lengthy diary entry. It talked about
many fabulous things like my fun times playing computer
games, shaver's new fantastic apartment, yet another
installment of Globe Rules, and even some nice open sourcey
projecty updatey things.

Well, I'm mostly moved now. My apartment is super neat. One
of these
days I'll get the pictures of it off of
Phil's
camera and maybe share
them. I have an enormous shopping list, at the top of which
is couch.

I managed to make it Ottawa over the weekend for some brief
partying.
I hung out with my good TPG friends, it was good clean fun.
Phil, the evil one, introduced me to
Home
World. Added to shopping list:
Uber-Sexy video card and gi-normous monitor.
I tried poutine again and wasn't too impressed, again.
Maybe its an
acquired tastes, like coffee (yuck) and beer (ew). I'm
basically
doomed.

I arrived back on Sunday night to find that Montreal had
been buried
in a few feet of snow. I so have
Federico beat on the
Ice Planet Hoth
scale. I didn't grow up in the stuff, so I thought
it was great fun. I even manged to catch a ride from a
truck driver
that was zipping around town in his pick-up pretending to be
a taxi.

I'm tempted to write up a rant on coding style, but what
would be the
point? StudlyCapsAreEvil (extra points for half the
characters being
redundant and expressed in the source tree), but everyone
knows that.
#ifdefs hurt, but thats no surprise either. Yet people
continue to
use them. Baby steps.

Lots of neat people are in town for some linux show as
well. Last
night we went to dinner at a yummy supposedly-malaysian
restaurant.
I was very happy with their curry, but Mang kept
saying that their
Malaysian dishes were a little off. The others braved some
exotic
desert while I stayed with cheesecake. My cheesecake was
nummy, Phil's
exotic desert came with a sausage. No, we're not sure
either.

We saw The Matrix on an IMAX screen. It was big, and the
audio
was especially nice. I had meant to bring a camera to the
event so that we could have pictures of us all being silly,
but I forgot. Someone else remembered, but by the time they
had given me a camera I had realized that I don' t like
carrying
a camera around. So there.

Yesterday we had a package delivered to our door. Someone
sent us the fuel tank from a 1947 Jeep. Neat.

I've been reading all sorts of interesting things about
wireless
ethernet. I'm excited.

I'm sure other things are worth mentioning, but I can't be
bothered
to remember what they might be.

Ben and
I went to dinner at
Southern Accent last night. Happily spicy food and
strong
drinks (including the Voodootini). We didn't understand why
it
was empty until the waiter explained that it was Oscar
night. Oh. That would explain the other restaurants that
were
closed but had private parties with big TVs.

I arrived at work to find e-mail from Steph who is indeed
still
alive. Good, good.

I played around a bit with glade this weekend and was not
terribly
impressed. I'm not smart enough to put up with GUI design
work.
It sure would be Neato if it were integreated with a usable
IDE, though.